Development: Reflections from Bolivia

1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Jones
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Budget Cuts ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Mental Constructs

The results of development are now widely thought to have betrayed expectations. Using illustrations from Bolivia, this essay argues that these dispiriting results often owe to distortions that render development something other than what it pretends to be, or is usually understood to be. The distortions derive from the use of inappropriate mental constructs, from links to foreign policy, from "expert" ignorance, and from weak sensitivity by development agencies to how their interventions are construed by local economic and power elites. While these agencies have formal mechanisms to correct some of the distortions, the mechanisms too often fail to work. Correcting these distortions is a daunting task, rooted as they are deep in national institutions and conceptions of national interest. The end of the Cold War nonetheless affords an auspicious moment for doing so. Indeed, not to is to risk turmoil in regions like Latin America. Yet international capitalist powers and local elites are not seizing the moment; exulting in victory, they continue down old paths. Further alarming is the anti-aid sentiment in the United States and Europe, with consequent political advocacy ranging from abolishment to varying degrees of reform under large budget cuts.

Marinera with the Yankees

2018 ◽  
pp. 91-124
Author(s):  
Iñigo García-Bryce
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
State Department ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Asylum ◽  
Student Leader ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This chapter explores Haya’s changing relationship with the United States. As an exiled student leader he denounced “Yankee imperialism” and alarmed observers in the U.S. State Department. Yet once he entered Peruvian politics, Haya understood the importance of cultivating U.S.-Latin American relations. While in hiding he maintained relations with U.S. intellectuals and politicians and sought U.S. support for his embattled party. His writings increasingly embraced democracy and he maneuvered to position APRA as an ally in the U.S. fight fascism during the 1930s and 40s, and then communism during the Cold War. The five years he spent in Lima’s Colombian embassy awaiting the resolution of his political asylum case, made him into an international symbol of the democratic fight against dictatorship. He would always remain a critic of U.S. support for dictatorships in Latin America.

Brazil and ‘Latin America’

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
LESLIE BETHELL
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
History Of ◽  
America Latina ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time

AbstractThis essay, part history of ideas and part history of international relations, examines Brazil's relationship with Latin America in historical perspective. For more than a century after independence, neither Spanish American intellectuals nor Spanish American governments considered Brazil part of ‘América Latina’. For their part, Brazilian intellectuals and Brazilian governments only had eyes for Europe and increasingly, after 1889, the United States, except for a strong interest in the Río de la Plata. When, especially during the Cold War, the United States, and by extension the rest of the world, began to regard and treat Brazil as part of ‘Latin America’, Brazilian governments and Brazilian intellectuals, apart from some on the Left, still did not think of Brazil as an integral part of the region. Since the end of the Cold War, however, Brazil has for the first time pursued a policy of engagement with its neighbours – in South America.

From the Cold War to the Cruelty of Violence: Jean Franco's Critical Trajectory from The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City to Cruel Modernity

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Arturo Arias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Lettered City ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

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